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<td valign="top"> <h2><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><strong><a name="Version5_3">Poly/ML
Version 5.4</a></strong></font></h2>
<p><font size="-1" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Released September
2010</font></p>
<p><strong><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><strong>Major New Features</strong></font></strong></p>
<ul>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"> Major rewrite of the X86
code-generator and combining the 32 and 64-bit versions into a single
module. It now supports the floating point instructions.</font></li>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"> Changes to the way functions
with polymorphic equality are handled to eliminate the "structural
equality" code.</font></li>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Uses the GMP library if
that is available when Poly/ML is built otherwise falls back to the
old Poly/ML code.</font></li>
</ul>
<p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><strong>Minor Additions and
Changes </strong></font></p>
<ul>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Added a SingleAssignment
structure</font></li>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Support for the Itanium
processor using the interpreted version.</font></li>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Various bug fixes.</font></li>
</ul>
<h2><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><strong><a name="Version5_3">Poly/ML
Version 5.3</a></strong></font></h2>
<p><font size="-1" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Released November
2009</font></p>
<p><strong><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><strong>Major New Features</strong></font></strong></p>
<ul>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Addition of IDE interface
support.</font></li>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Changes to pretty-printing
and equality. These are now inherited across module boundaries. Addition
of PolyML.addPrettyPrinter to install a new-style pretty printer.</font></li>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Reworked implementation
of signatures reducing the memory requirements when a named signature
is used in multiple places.</font></li>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Improvements to printing
of types and error messages.</font></li>
</ul>
<p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><strong>Minor Additions and
Changes </strong></font></p>
<ul>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Support for out-of-tree
builds</font></li>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Added finalisation for foreign-function
interface (CInterface)</font></li>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Removed remaining support
for ML90</font></li>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Added PolyML.sourceLocation
pseudo-function that returns the current source location, PolyML.raiseWithLocation
that raises an exception with an explicit location and PolyML.exceptionLocation
that returns the location where an exception was raised.</font></li>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Added PolyML.Compiler.reportUnreferencedIds
switch to enable reporting of unreferenced identifiers.</font></li>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Added breakEx and clearEx
to debugger functions. These enter the debugger when the code raises
a given exception.</font></li>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Improvement to resonsiveness
to pipes especially in Windows.</font></li>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Added X86-64 version of
Word32 structure. 64-bit machines do not require 32-bit values to be
"boxed". </font></li>
</ul>
<p><strong><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><strong>Bug Fixes</strong></font></strong></p>
<ul>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Now builds on Mac OS X 10.6
(Snow Leopard)</font></li>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Fix multi-threading on Sparc
but now only supports v9 processors.</font></li>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Fix timing-related crash
when Poly/ML exits</font></li>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Fix string argument to OS.SysErr
exception </font></li>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Fix to OS.FileSys.mkDir
in Windows</font></li>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Fix to pow(~1, n) where
n is even</font></li>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Various fixes to conform
more closely to the standard.</font></li>
</ul>
<h2><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><strong><a name="Version5_2_1">Poly/ML
Version 5.2.1</a></strong></font></h2>
<p><font size="-1" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Released October
2008</font></p>
<p><strong><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><strong>Bug Fixes</strong></font></strong></p>
<ul>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Various fixes to the run-time
system.</font></li>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Fix in Thread.ConditionVar.waitUntil.
This could deadlock if the time calculation resulted in a garbage collection.</font></li>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Fix to Substring.isPrefix
and Substring.isSuffix with single character arguments.</font></li>
</ul>
<font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><strong>Minor Additions
and Changes </strong></font>
<ul>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">X-Windows/Motif is now not
included by default. The --with-x option is required for configure</font></li>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Functional I/O has been
changed to be more efficient.</font></li>
</ul>
<h2><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><strong><a name="Version5_2">Poly/ML
Version 5.2</a></strong></font></h2>
<p><font size="-1" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Released June 2008</font></p>
<p><strong><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><strong>Major New Features</strong></font></strong></p>
<ul>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Changes to PolyML.compiler.
Addition of "namespaces" to allow top-level declarations to
be grouped</font></li>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Improvements to real numbers
on X86 (32 and 64-bit)</font></li>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Improvements to the source-level
debugger</font></li>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Addition of weak references
in the Weak structure.</font></li>
</ul>
<p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><strong>Minor Additions and
Changes </strong></font></p>
<ul>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Fixed a hot-spot in the
compiler.</font></li>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Changes to handling of signals
in the Signal structure</font></li>
</ul>
<h2><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><strong><a name="Version5_1">Poly/ML
Version 5.1</a></strong></font></h2>
<p><font size="-1" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Released November 2007</font></p>
<p><strong><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><strong>Major New Features</strong></font></strong></p>
<ul>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">True multi-threading</font></li>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Saving state</font></li>
</ul>
<p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><strong>Minor Additions and
Changes </strong></font></p>
<ul>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Support for building Windows
version on msys.</font></li>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Support for building interpreted
version for ARM processor.</font></li>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Changes to some message
values in the Windows interface structure. The type of Windows callback
functions has changed.</font></li>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Addition of Int32 structure
and TEXT_IO signature to the basis library.</font></li>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Support for building Sparc
version on Linux.</font></li>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">SIGALRM is no longer used
by the run-time system.</font></li>
</ul>
<p><strong><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><strong>Bug Fixes</strong></font></strong></p>
<ul>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Now builds on Mac OS X 10.5
(Leopard)</font></li>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Fix for Sparc Solaris 10
which would crash because Poly/ML used the g7 register</font></li>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Added signature constraints
after structure values (strexp: sigexp)</font></li>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Word8Array.vector produced
wrong value when applied to an empty array.</font></li>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Fix to type of Real.fromDecimal
and changes to handling of overflow in conversion of strings to reals.</font></li>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Fix to Word32.~ and addition
of overload for it.</font></li>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Fix to start-up code on
PowerPC which could cause a crash under some C compilers.</font></li>
</ul>
<h2><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><strong><a name="Version5_0">Poly/ML Version 5</a></strong></font></h2>
<p><strong><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><strong>New Features</strong></font></strong></p>
<ul>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Support for stand-alone
binaries</font></li>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"> Support for additional
platforms: AMD64, Intel Macs, Cygwin</font></li>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"> No artificial limits on
size of heaps or saved image</font></li>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"> Uses standard GNU tools
for building</font></li>
<li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Fixed address mmap and trap-handling
removed </font></li>
</ul>
<p><strong><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><strong>Version 5</strong></font></strong></p>
<p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Thanks to some financial support
from the Verisoft project organised through the Technical University of
Munich I have spent several months updating the Poly/ML run-time system.
There are many internal changes detailed below but there is one major
change that is likely to affect all users. The persistent storage system
that has been a feature of Poly/ML almost since the beginning has finally
reached its sell-by date and has been removed. In its place there is the
facility to export ML functions as object files and link them to produce
stand-alone executables.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Although the ML code has not
been significantly changed, with the exception of a new code-generator
for the 64-bit AMD/Intel processor, the run-time system has been modified
substantially. The aim has been to try to produce a version that will
work across a wider range of systems than before and will be much simpler
to maintain. The C code has been converted to C++ and standard GNU tools:
autoconf, automake and libtool are used to build the system. Memory mapping
to fixed addresses, which caused problems with various Linux distributions,
has been removed and the use of traps to handle arbitrary precision overflow
and heap limits has been replaced by calls into the run-time system. The
artificial limits on the size of the heap and of the saved database have
been removed and the only limit on the size of the working heap is likely
to be swap space.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">To build and install Poly/ML
download and unpack the source. You can then build poly with the commands</font></p>
<p><font face="Courier New, Courier, mono"> <strong>./configure<br>
make<br>
make install</strong></font></p>
<p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">./configure by default places
installed files within /usr/local and in particular the libraries are
placed in /usr/local/lib. Some Unix distributions (e.g. Fedora Core) do
not include /usr/local/lib in the library search path and on those distributions
it may be better to override this by specifying<br>
<font face="Courier New, Courier, mono"><strong>./configure --prefix=/usr</strong></font></font></p>
<p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">You build an application by
constructing your application as an ML function and calling <font face="Courier New, Courier, mono">PolyML.export</font>.
<font face="Courier New, Courier, mono">PolyML.export</font> takes as
its argument a file name for the resulting object file and a function
to export. It will automatically add the normal extension for an object
file (.o or .obj as appropriate) unless it already included and write
out the function and any data reachable from it as a normal operating
system object file. This can then be linked with the poly libraries to
build an application.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><strong>Example of building
an application</strong></font></p>
<p><font face="Courier New, Courier, mono">$ <strong>poly</strong><br>
Poly/ML 5.0 Release<br>
> <strong>fun f () = print "Hello World\n";</strong><br>
val f = fn : unit -> unit<br>
> <strong>PolyML.export("hello", f);</strong><br>
val it = () : unit<br>
> <strong>^D</strong><br>
$ <strong>cc -o hello hello.o -lpolymain -lpolyml</strong><br>
$ <strong>./hello</strong><br>
Hello World</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">If you have installed the libraries
in a directory that is not in the search path you may need to add this.
For example<br>
<font face="Courier New, Courier, mono">cc -o hello hello.o -L/usr/local/lib
-lpolymain -lpolyml</font><br>
It is possible to use the ld command rather than cc here but you may need
to include some of the default C and C++ libraries on the command line.
On some platforms it may be necessary to add -lstdc++ and on Mac OS X
you may need to add <font face="Courier New, Courier, mono">-segprot POLY
rwx rwx</font> to prevent a Bus Error when you run your application.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">It is often the case that applications
built using Poly/ML will want to use the normal Poly/ML top-level but
with additional ML functions or structures built in. In the old version
this was achieved by compiling the new declarations and then committing
the database. The new version does this slightly differently. First compile
in the new declarations as before and then export the Poly/ML top level
by exporting <font face="Courier New, Courier, mono">PolyML.rootFunction</font>.</font></p>
<p><font face="Courier New, Courier, mono">$ <strong>poly</strong></font><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><br>
<font face="Courier New, Courier, mono">Poly/ML 5.0 Release<br>
> <strong>val myValue = "This is a new value";</strong><br>
val myValue = "This is a new value" : string<br>
> <strong>PolyML.export("mypoly", PolyML.rootFunction);</strong><br>
val it = () : unit<br>
> <strong>^D</strong><br>
$ <strong>cc -o mypoly mypoly.o -lpolymain -lpolyml</strong><br>
$ <strong>./mypoly</strong><br>
Poly/ML 5.0 Beta1<br>
> <strong>myValue;</strong><br>
val it = "This is a new value" : string<br>
> </font></font></p>
<p><font face="Courier New, Courier, mono">PolyML.export</font><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
writes its output to an object file in the native format on the machine
on which it is running. Currently Poly/ML supports three different formats:
ELF, used on Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris; PCOFF, used on Windows and Cygwin
and Mach-O, used on Mac OS X. If it is necessary to distribute software
in object format it would be inconvenient to have to produce versions
for each combination of architecture (e.g. X86-32, X86-64, PPC and Sparc)
and each possible object format. To avoid this there is a <font face="Courier New, Courier, mono">PolyML.exportPortable</font>
function which takes similar arguments to <font face="Courier New, Courier, mono">PolyML.export</font>
but writes its output to a text file in a portable format. There is a
<font face="Courier New, Courier, mono">polyimport</font> command which
loads a file stored in this format and runs it.</font></p>
<p><font face="Courier New, Courier, mono">$ <strong>poly</strong><br>
Poly/ML 5.0 </font><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><font face="Courier New, Courier, mono">Release</font></font><font face="Courier New, Courier, mono"><br>
> <strong>fun f () = print "Hello World\n";</strong><br>
val f = fn : unit -> unit<br>
> <strong>PolyML.exportPortable("hello", f);</strong><br>
val it = () : unit<br>
> <strong>^D</strong><br>
$ <strong>polyimport hello.txt</strong><br>
Hello World</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">While this is convenient for
porting the portable format is not designed for efficiency. The Poly/ML
build process uses the portable format within the distribution but the
build script then exports the code in the native format. N.B. The portable
format only avoids the need to produce different object code formats.
It is not portable across different architectures (e.g. i386 to PPC) since
the portable file still contains native machine instructions encoded as
strings.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">The previous version of Poly/ML
had a command line option to compress a database by sharing immutable
data. This has been replaced in the new version by the <font face="Courier New, Courier, mono">PolyML.shareCommonData</font>
function. This takes as its argument any data structure and it processes
this structure replacing any multiple occurrences of the same immutable
data by a pointer to a single occurrence. In effect, wherever in the data
structure there are two substructures which would be equal using the ML
definition of equality there will be a pointer to a single data structure.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">The intended use of this is
primarily to reduce the size of a data structure before it is exported.
It can be used in the above example but in this case the function being
exported is so simple that it is unlikely to be worthwhile.</font></p>
<p> <font face="Courier New, Courier, mono">$ <strong>poly</strong><br>
Poly/ML 5.0 </font><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><font face="Courier New, Courier, mono">Release</font></font><font face="Courier New, Courier, mono"><br>
> <strong>fun f () = print "Hello World\n";</strong><br>
val f = fn : unit -> unit<br>
> <strong>PolyML.shareCommonData f;</strong><br>
val it = () : unit<br>
> <strong>PolyML.export("hello", f);</strong><br>
val it = () : unit<br>
> <strong>^D</strong></font></p>
<p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">The new version uses the standard
GNU tools: autoconf, automake and libtool. There is no need to install
these tools in order to install and run Poly/ML unless you need to make
modifications to the setup which are not handled within the configure
and make files. Using these tools should make porting to other versions
of Unix easier and should make it fairly simple to build binary or source
distributions to include in Unix distributions.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">The command line arguments
to Poly/ML have been simplified. There are a few command line arguments
that are taken by the Poly/ML run time system and the remainder are passed
to the application via the standard basis library CommandLine structure.
The run-time system recognises the following arguments:</font><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
</font></p>
<table width="0%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
<tr>
<td width="100"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">-H</font></td>
<td width="404"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><Initial
heap size (MB)></font></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="100"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">--immutable</font></td>
<td><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><Initial size of immutable
buffer (MB)></font></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="100"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">--mutable</font></td>
<td><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><Initial size of mutable
buffer(MB)></font></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="100"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">--debug</font></td>
<td><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><Debug options></font></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="100"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">--timeslice</font></td>
<td><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><Time slice (ms)></font></td>
</tr>
</table>
<p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">The poly application itself
recognises a few arguments: </font></p>
<table width="0%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
<tr>
<td width="100"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">-v</font></td>
<td width="404"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Print the
version of Poly/ML and exit</font></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="100"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">--help</font></td>
<td><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Print the list of arguments
and exit</font></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="100"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">-q</font></td>
<td><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Suppress the start-up
message</font></td>
</tr>
</table>
<p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">If you are building your own
application that recognises --help as a command line argument you should
call <font face="Courier New, Courier, mono">PolyML.rtsArgumentHelp()</font>
to retrieve the information about the run-time system arguments and include
this in any help text you produce.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">The heap size arguments set
the initial heap size but the heap may grow beyond this if your application
needs more space. If no argument is set the default size is half the physical
memory available on your machine.</font></p>
<h2><font face="Arial"><strong>Release notes: Version 4.1.4 Release</strong></font></h2>
<h3><strong><font face="Arial"><strong>New features and Changes</strong></font></strong></h3>
<p><font face="Arial">Converted PolyML.dsw and PolyML.dsp to binary. This
simplifies building from source on Windows.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">The exception PolyML.Commit now has type string->exn.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">PolyML.commit now raises PolyML.Commit if the database
is read-only. </font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">Timing functions no longer fail occasionally with
getrusage: EINTR on Solaris (actually a work-around for a bug/documentation
error in Solaris).</font></p>
<h2><font face="Arial"><strong>Release notes: Version 4.1.3 Release</strong></font></h2>
<h3><font face="Arial"><strong>New features and Changes</strong></font></h3>
<p><font face="Arial"><strong>Printing control switches<br>
</strong>New switches have been added to the Poly/ML.Compiler structure
to control the printing of declarations. In both cases the default setting
is true. Setting PolyML.Compiler.printInAlphabeticalOrder causes declarations
to be printed in the order in which they were made rather than in alphabetical
order. Setting PolyML.Compiler.printTypesWithStructureName to false causes
types to be printed without the structure from which they came.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><strong>Large database support</strong><br>
The support for large databases has been improved and it is now possible
to create a database which will occupy all of the virtual memory reserved
for it. The actual limits vary between operating systems and platforms
but are typically around 400Mbytes.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">To aid this the -S option when running the disc garbage-collector
(-d option), introduced in 4.1.1, has been extended with -Smin and -Smax.
The options can be written using either -s or -S and with or without a
space. Setting a size is now "sticky" so if no -s/-S option
is given the previous limits are retained rather than being reset to the
default. The -Smax option sets the limits to the maximum space available.
This space now depends only on the size reserved for any parent databases
and not, as before, on the history of the database.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">The -Smin option compacts the database into a size
whose upper limit is set to the size actually in use before compaction.
To make best use of it it is probably best to run it twice, once to compact
the database and again to set the upper limits to the now reduced size.
It is useful when a database has been created which will not be modified
further but where child databases may be created. Compacting a database
to the minimum size allows any child databases to occupy as much space
as possible.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"> The disc garbage collection has been changed so that
it is now possible to use all the address space. Previously it was always
necessary to reserve a certain portion of the space to allow the database
to be collected.<br>
</font></p>
<h3><font face="Arial"><strong>Bugs fixed</strong></font></h3>
<p><strong><font face="Arial">Mac OS X 10.2<br>
</font></strong><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Mac OS X 10.2
introduced a undocumented change to the kernel interface when delivering
signals. This meant that the original binaries will not run on 10.2. This
has now been fixed.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><strong>Crash on delivering
console interrupt on PowerPC</strong><br>
There was a bug in the Poly/ML process (lightweight thread) code on the
PowerPC which caused a crash when a process terminated. This could happen
when a user-installed signal handler was called, for example the console
interrupt handler in Isabelle.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><strong>Crash in equality code</strong><br>
An error in the compilation of the equality function meant that certain
expressions involving equality could cause a crash. This has been fixed.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"> </font></p>
<h2><font face="Arial"><strong>Release notes: Version 4.1.2 Release</strong></font></h2>
<h3><font face="Arial"><strong>New features and Changes</strong></font></h3>
<p><font face="Arial"><strong>Flexible records (Pattern rows with record
wildcards)<br>
</strong>The Standard requires that a flexible record must be constrained
to a fixed set of labels by the program context. It does not specify
what that context should be. Previous versions of Poly/ML, along
with most other compilers, have required the context to be the point at
which the declaration containing the flexible record was generalised,
often requiring a type constraint. For example:<br>
<tt>let fun f {a, ...} = a in f{a=1,b=2} end</tt>;<br>
was rejected. Poly/ML now allows the record to be constrained anywhere
within the same topdec. </font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"> </font></p>
<h3><font face="Arial"><strong>Bugs fixed</strong></font></h3>
<p><font face="Arial"><strong>"moveToVec - invalid constant address"<br>
</strong>The compiler failed with an exception and this message when trying
to take apart a tuple which was known at compile time to be an exception.
For example: let val (x,y) = raise Fail "" in x end; .</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><strong>Infinite loop with unterminated input</strong><br>
If an input stream contained an error (e.g. a syntax or type error) and
ended without a newline Poly would go into an infinite loop.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><strong>Linux/i386 - Crashes with large heaps</strong><br>
There were a number of crashes when the heap grew to several hundred megabytes
as a result of it overwriting other data. The virtual address range
used has now been changed. The maximum size of the heap on this
architecture has also been increased to 1.1 Gigabytes for the immutable
heap and 256 Megabytes for the mutable.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><strong>Linux - Compiling</strong><br>
The sources would not compile on some versions of Linux due to the use
of <sys/time.h> instead of <time.h>.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><strong>Syntax of specifications and signature</strong><br>
There were a number of cases where Poly/ML would not accept the full syntax
of Standard ML 97. Empty specifications were not accepted, signature
declarations were not accepted after type declarations within the same
topdec and multiple type abbreviations connected by "and" were
not accepted.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><strong>Windows bitViewer example</strong><br>
The bitViewer example contained a reference to the Base structure which
has been removed, preventing it from compiling.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><strong>Interrupt exception while running the compiler</strong><br>
Raising an Interrupt exception from the console at certain points within
the compiler could result in confusing traceback information being printed.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"> </font></p>
<h2><font face="Arial"><strong>Release notes: Version 4.1.1Release</strong></font></h2>
<p><font face="Arial"><strong>Update on 5th November 2001(driver source
only). Bug fix: Overflowing Poly stack could cause crash. </strong><br>
A deeply or infinitely recursing function could result in a segmentation
fault. It will now raise an Interrupt exception.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><strong>Update on 28th October 2001 (driver source
only). Bug fix: Large heaps in Linux caused random errors. </strong><br>
If the heap grew very large in Linux it could overwrite local variables,
causing random failures.</font></p>
<h3><font face="Arial"><strong>New features and Changes</strong></font></h3>
<p><font face="Arial"><strong>Windows™ interface<br>
</strong>This release includes structures to allow Windows graphical programs
to be written in Poly/ML. See the <a href="Windows.html">Windows
Programming in Poly/ML</a> and <a href="Winref/Reference.html">Windows
Interface Reference</a> for more information.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><strong>Extensions to the Symbolic Debugger.</strong><br>
The symbolic debugger introduced in version 4.1 has been extended.
There are additional functions to step over a function and to step out.
The debugger attempts to print the source line when it stops at a breakpoint.
For this to work the source must have been compiled using a full path
name or the debugger must be run in the same directory that the source
was compiled in. The debugger now displays values from opened structures
and in abstype declarations.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><strong>Printing top-level exceptions.</strong><br>
When an exception is raised at the top-level the compiler now prints the
parameters in the exception packet if the exception is declared at the
top-level or in any top-level structure. Previously it would only
print the parameters if the exception was declared unqualified at the
top-level. <br>
This is particularly useful for exceptions raised by the Standard Basis
Library such as IO.Io and OS.SysErr. Previously if, for example,
TextIO.openIn failed to open a file the only information available was
that the Io exception had been raised. Now the parameters will be
printed giving much more useful information.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><strong>Large databases.<br>
</strong>Previous versions of Poly/ML had limits on the size of the database
of around 63Mbytes. This remains the default limit but larger databases
are now possible, up to around 400Mbytes. To increase the limit
it is necessary to run the disc garbage collector and specify the -S option.<br>
e.g. poly -d -S 250 ML_dbase<br>
This will compact the database and set the maximum size to 250Mbytes.
Attempts to set the size to a value which is too large will fail with
the message "Not enough address spaces". The limit on
the size depends on the current maximum database size (the larger the
current size the smaller the new size may be) and is reduced if the database
is a child database.<br>
There are actually two limits on the size of a database: the mutable data
size (space for refs and arrays) and the immutable data size (everything
else) and a database cannot be expanded if either of these limits is reached.
The space available is divided between these two in the ratio 1:8.
There is currently no way of changing this.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><strong>CInterface structure</strong><br>
Added unsigned integer conversions. Added functions to convert between
Word8Vector.vector and C arrays. toCchar and fromCchar now convert
between the ML char type and C char rather using the ML string type.</font></p>
<h3><font face="Arial"><strong>Bugs fixed</strong></font></h3>
<p><font face="Arial"><strong>Changes to representation of datatypes.<br>
</strong>There was a potential bug in the way datatypes were implemented.
Previously the representation of a datatype was implemented using static
information about the number of constructors and their types. Various
optimisations are possible if, for example, it is known that the only
non-nullary constructor takes a tuple as an argument. These optimisations
are not always possible if a datatype can be passed as an argument to
a functor. Simon Finn pointed out that datatype replication could
result in a datatype being passed into a functor in circumstances that
was not possible in ML90. Rather than remove the optimisation the
handling of datatypes has been changed so that constructors are passed
as arguments to a functor. In practice these are optimised away
if functors are expanded inline (the default setting). Because it
is now possible to use the optimised representation in all cases the code
is likely to be faster than before.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><strong>Correctly converts negative hexadecimal numbers<br>
</strong>Previously values such as ~0x1 were always converted as zero.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><strong>Correctly prints singleton records</strong><br>
Singleton records (e.g. {a=1}) were previously printed as {...}.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><strong>Some functions with side-effects were not
evaluated if their results were not used</strong><br>
For example, fun f s = (print s; true); fun p s = not (f s); val _ = p
"OK\n"; did not work correctly in 4.1. This has been fixed.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><strong>Changes to allow compilation on Solaris 6.<br>
</strong>There was a problem compiling the sources in older versions of
Solaris.</font></p>
<p> </p>
<h2><a name="4.1"></a><font face="Arial"><strong>Release notes: Version
4.1 Experimental</strong></font></h2>
<h3><font face="Arial"><strong>Bugs fixed</strong></font></h3>
<p><font face="Arial"><strong>Exception matching in val bindings.<br>
</strong>Previous releases contained a bug in the processing of val bindings
when the pattern was an exception constructor.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><strong>Closing Standard Output.</strong><br>
Closing standard output caused an infinite loop in previous versions.</font></p>
<h3><strong><font face="Arial" color="#000000">Changes since </font><font face="Arial">Version
4.0 Release</font></strong></h3>
<p><font face="Arial"><strong>Source Level Debugger.<br>
</strong>This release includes a source level debugger which allows the
use to set and clear breakpoints and view local variables. Code
compiled for use with the debugger can be freely mixed with other code.
See <a href="Debugging.html">here</a> for a full description. A
PolyML.Debug structure has been added and a PolyML.Compiler.debug flag.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><strong>Free type variables.</strong><br>
The language definition says that no free type variables may enter the
basis but leaves it to the implementer whether to refuse elaboration or
instead replace the type variables by monotypes. Version 4.0 refused
to elaborate expressions such as<br>
fun f () = raise Fail "error"; f();<br>
Version 4.1 allows it to elaborate but produces a warning message.
The result is bound to a unique monotype distinct from any other type
in the basis.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><strong>Substantial changes to the optimiser.<br>
</strong>The optimiser has been substantially changed so that many more
cases can be compiled in-line. Small tail-recursive functions, such
as List.foldl, are now compiled as while-loops within the calling functions.
Small recursive functions which are not tail-recursive, such as List.map,
are compiled as specialised functions so that the function being mapped
is inserted into the specialised function. When mapping a small
function over a list this can produce big improvements by avoiding the
need for a function call for each element of the list. Applying
these optimisations and a few others within the compiler itself has produced
a substantial speed up.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><strong>Formatting of pretty-printed output.</strong><br>
The format used when printing top-level expressions, particularly structures
and functors, has been improved to give a more consistent appearance.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><strong>Tuples as results</strong>.<br>
Previous versions of the compiler allocated memory to contain tuples returned
from functions or even from an if-expression. This version now allocates
store on the stack to receive the results, reducing the load on the garbage
collector.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><strong>Improvement to TextIO.</strong><br>
The TextIO structure is defined as imperative operations on top of the
functional IO layer. Implementing it in this way, though, turned
out to be inefficient if the functional layer was not used. TextIO
has now been rewritten so that if TextIO.getInstream is never called on
a stream it can be handled entirely within the imperative layer.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><strong>Specialised equality functions.</strong><br>
Previous releases contained specialised code for equality for a few built-in
types such as int and string but defaulted to the general structure equality
in more general cases. The compiler now generates functions for
equality in most cases. Because of the changes to the optimiser
these will usually be compiled in-line even when operating on recursive
types such as lists. This is most successful when the compiler has
specific type information so the addition of a cast may well speed up
a function. </font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><strong>X-Windows/Motif - new functions.</strong><br>
The following functions have been added to the Motif structure:</font><br>
val XtGetApplicationResources: Widget -> (string * string * XmRType)
list -> Arg list <br>
val XtAddEventHandler: > Widget -> XWindows.EventMask list ->
bool -> (Widget * 'a XWindows.XEvent -> unit) -> unit<br>
val XmMenuPosition: Widget -> 'a XWindows.XEvent -> unit</p>
<p><font face="Arial"><strong>Assignment to references in the database.<br>
</strong>Older versions of the compiler always made calls to the run-time
system to handle assignment. In version 4.0 this was changed so
that the assignment operation was compile in-line, speeding up imperative
functions when the reference being updated was local. If the reference
was in the database assignment involved a trap and the assignment was
emulated by the run-time system. This has now been changed so that
there is only a trap the first time a reference is updated. More
specifically, references in the database are packed into pages and if
any of the references in a page are updated the whole page is marked "dirty"
and no further traps will occur for that page. <br>
The format of a database has changed slightly as a result so version 4.1
databases may only be used with a run-time system built for this version.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><strong>Low-level code-generation.</strong><br>
Various changes have been made to the low-level code-generators, particularly
in the handling of constants and calls to functions which are known at
compile-time. The code-generators now generate code for more functions
such as Word.* which previously required calls to the run-time system.
Functions now contain information about the registers they modify to reduce
the need to save registers across calls.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><strong>Mac OS/X</strong><br>
Real number rounding control (IEEEReal.getRoundingMode and IEEEReal.setRoundingMode)
has now been added to the Mac OS/X version of Poly/ML 4.1.
This version has been tested with the release version of Mac OS/X.
The foreign function interface (CInterface structure), time profiling
(PolyML.profiling 1) and polling (OS.IO.poll) do not work in Mac OS/X.</font></p>
<p><a name="4.1Update"></a><font face="Arial"><strong>Update on 25th April
2001. Slow "commit" and database compaction in Linux and
Solaris</strong><br>
There was a problem with writing to the database which appeared in some
versions of Unix. This was particularly noticeable on machines
with slow discs or where the database was accessed over a network.
A revised version of the driver sources has now been installed to correct
this problem.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><strong>Update on 3rd May 2001. Bug fix: Corrupted
parent database file name. </strong><br>
When running the disc garbage collector on a child database in Mac OS
X the parent file name became corrupted.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><strong>Update on 3rd May 2001. Fix to allow
compilation on Mac OS X with X-Windows/Motif</strong>.</font></p>
<h2><a name="4.0"></a><font face="Arial"><strong>Release notes: Version
4.0 Release</strong></font></h2>
<h3><font face="Arial"><strong>Bugs fixed since Version 4.0 beta1</strong></font></h3>
<p><font face="Arial" color="#000000"><strong>Negative integers printed
strangely.</strong><br>
Bug in Version 4.0 beta1: Negative numbers printed as large positive numbers.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial" color="#000000"><strong>Files were created with execute
permission.</strong><br>
The default creation mask for files was 777 (read, write and execute permission).
This has been changed to 666 (read and write permission).</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial" color="#000000"><strong>i386 code-generator bug.</strong><br>
A bug was found in the i386 code-generator which among other things caused
Poly/ML to crash when given an integer in hexadecimal (e.g. 0x1).</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial" color="#000000"><strong>Linux: Typing control-C
would sometimes cause a crash.</strong><br>
Poly/ML would sometimes crash if control-C was pressed. This
was highly timing-dependent and occurred only if the SIGINT arrived at
the same time as another signal such as a SIGSEGV used to indicate a garbage-collection
or arbitrary-precision emulation trap.</font></p>
<p> </p>
<h3><strong><font face="Arial" color="#000000">Changes since </font><font face="Arial">Version
4.0 beta1</font></strong></h3>
<p><font face="Arial"><strong>The default for print depth is now 100.<br>
</strong>The default value for PolyML.print_depth is now 100 instead of
1.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><strong>Power architecture version now fully supported.</strong>
<br>
The Power architecture is now supported under MacOS-X beta and LinuxPPC.
</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><strong>Removed various exceptions from the PolyML
structure.</strong><br>
The Interrupt, Div, Bind, Match, Size, Overflow, Underflow and Subscript
exceptions have been removed from the PolyML structure. These are
either free in the basis or are in the SML90 structure. </font></p>
<p><strong><font face="Arial">X-Windows/Motif now compiles with LessTif
and OpenMotif.</font></strong></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><strong>Sparc/Solaris: Removed check that the whole
of the address space was available.</strong><br>
The Sparc/Solaris version attempts to reserve a very large region of memory
to prevent any other library from allocating within the area that Poly/ML
might use for its heap. This caused problems if there was a limit
on the amount of virtual memory that a program could reserve and has been
removed.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><strong>Links as "discgarb" and "changeParent"
now work for path names.</strong><br>
For backwards compatibility it is possible to create a link to the poly
executable called "discgarb" and invoke the program through
that rather than specify the -d option to poly. This previously
worked only if the program was invoked as "discgarb" not as,
for example, "/usr/bin/discgarb". This has now been changed
so that only the last component of the name is examined.</font></p>
<p> </p>
<h2><a name="4.0beta1"></a><font face="Arial"><strong>Release notes: Version
4.0 beta1</strong></font></h2>
<h3><font face="Arial"><strong>Bugs fixed since Beta 4.0</strong></font></h3>
<p><font face="Arial" color="#000000"><strong>"InternalError: equality
- Overloadset found raised while compiling</strong>"<br>
This message was produced when compiling certain combinations of overloaded
functions and equality.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial" color="#000000"><strong>Failed to compile properly
on RedHat 6.2 and other recent versions of Linux</strong><br>
The SRPM version of the 4.0 beta release would compile on RedHat 6.2,
provided a few changes were made to the sources but the resulting binary
crashed.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial" color="#000000"><strong>StringCvt.padLeft and padRight
crashed when applied to single character strings</strong><br>
These functions caused a page fault when applied to strings containing
a single character.</font></p>
<h3><strong><font face="Arial" color="#000000">Changes since Beta 4.0</font></strong></h3>
<p><font face="Arial"><strong>Introduced the POLYPATH environment variable
to allow databases to be found using a path.</strong><br>
When searching for a database, whether given on the command line or to
find the parent of a child database, poly searches using the path given
in the POLYPATH environment variable. On most platforms it defaults
to ".:/usr/lib/poly:./usr/local/lib/poly" meaning that when
searching for a database called "dbase" it will first look in
the current directory and if that fails look for /usr/lib/poly/dbase and
finally /usr/local/lib/poly/dbase before giving up. Setting the
POLYPATH to an explicit path allows the user to specify where databases
are to be found.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial">As a result of this change poly now defaults to searching
for a database called ML_dbase in the path if no database is given on
the command line. The restriction that a child database can only
be created if the parent path name is fully specified has been removed.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><strong>Removed discgarb and changeParent.</strong><br>
The discgarb and changeParent programs have been removed and the functionality
incorporated into the poly program. New options have been added
to poly. The '-d' option compacts a database in the manner of discgarb.
An additional option '-c' can be used to run the </font><font size="3" face="Arial">common-expression
elimination phase. The '-p' option changes the parent of a database
as with changeParent. The old behaviour can be retained by creating
links to the poly binary called discgarb and changeParent and invoking
the binary through these names.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><strong>Changed TextIO.stdOut to use line buffering.</strong><br>
In Beta 4.0 this was unbuffered.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><strong>Added interruptConsoleProcesses to the Process
structure.</strong><br>
Process.interruptConsoleProcesses() causes all console process to be sent
the SML90.Interrupt exception. Usually there will only be
one console process, the top-level loop which runs the compiler and executes
the code.</font></p>
<p> </p>
<h2><a name="4.0beta"></a><font face="Arial"><strong>Version 4.0 beta</strong></font></h2>
<p><font face="Arial">Features and changes in this release.</font></p>
<h3><font face="Arial">Supports ML97</font></h3>
<p><font face="Arial">The revised definition of Standard ML (ML97) introduced
a number of changes. Poly/ML now implements this version
of the language. Some of the old (ML90) features are available
by setting </font><tt>PolyML.Compiler.ml90</tt><font face="Arial"> to
</font><tt>true</tt><font face="Arial">. The major changes include
value polymorphism, which removes the need for imperative type variables
and changes to the way structure sharing is handled. Type abbreviations
in signatures and datatype replication are also included.</font></p>
<h3><font face="Arial">Supports the Standard Basis Library</font></h3>
<p><font face="Arial">The <a href="StandBasis.html">Standard Basis Library</a>
is a suite of modules which provides a standard set of functions for many
purposes as well as access to many operating system facilities.
</font></p>
<h3><font face="Arial">Other changes</font></h3>
<p><font face="Arial">Linux: supports larger database size.<br>
Values are printed in alphabetical order.<br>
Various code-generator changes and fixes.<br>
Windows: the console is replaced by a Windows-style console.<br>
<a href="Signal.html">Signal structure allows signals to be handled or
blocked</a>.</font></p>
<p> </p>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>
